Sneaking Out the Back Door

Leaving Words Behind

Dear Friend,

No matter how many times I might tell you, how could you know what “I am well” means this particular Sunday? You cannot see whether the color of my skin is the same today as it was yesterday and no grayer. Nor can you see that the manner in which my hair thins betrays only an awareness of time’s passage but no real pain. How would it even make sense to you that  I no longer wake with the ache in my back that has greeted me each morning for over five years, even though, or perhaps because, I spend so much less of my time working out and so more of my time simply walking the nearby woods. Sometimes the air in the morning is cooler than it used to be. But not harshly cool. Cool in the pleasant way that draws Kathryn closer. And I can feel both the coolness of the air and warmth of her closeness at the same time. This is what I mean when I tell you I am well. I mean I am well.

I have only nine (Count them! 1, 2, 3,…,9) radiation treatments to go. Sometimes when I lie on the table I feel, or I imagine I feel, the radio waves dancing in my skull as the machine begins to hum, and it’s hard for me to swallow. Other times I fall into God before the mask is locked into place and I do not notice anything but the warmth of God’s breath until I eventually hear the technicians off in the distance telling me that the session is over, and I pretend I don’t hear them and I resist their invitation to come back into the room.  

I am ready for the radiation to end, but I also hope for the grace to be still for a few minutes each day and surrender time to wordlessness long after I am released from treatment. 

And the angels remain faithfully on duty. I know that you and others remain faithfully prayerful. And I remain pain-free and nausea-free, and remain faithfully grateful.

At some point you will wonder what comes after treatment. Is it okay for us to put that conversation off for just a bit? There is so much going on around me right here and right now that I don’t want to surrender this now-beauty to tomorrow. The future may come, and we will not be alone if she chooses to. We will have help and be loved and more than we dare to believe, and we will not only survive tomorrow’s arrival, we will delight in it. Especially if we release her from our own  expectations and delight in the gifts her brother, whose name is Today, offers to us.  

There are few things I find myself certain of. This is one of them. Because I know the one to whom I have given my heart. I am in good hands. I am also certain of that. 

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I have wanted to write to you all week. You might think that I have remained silent because there is nothing to share, but that is precisely not the because, at all. In fact, there is so much that I long to offer to you that the difficult part is not filling your inbox with all the things that find me these days. I’ve told you before. So many things find me.

Rather than lock in on one of those things, is it okay if we just wander a bit today? Can I describe just some of the sights?

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A friend recently gave me Grace and Gravity. I hope at some point to take a long, no-rushing, stop-at-every-overpass, notice-every-squirrel walk through it. I haven’t even gotten to the main trail yet, but there have been sights on the approach that have taken my breath away. 

In the introduction Gustav Thibon (who, by the way, I am only now meeting) describes Weil this way:

…Never have I felt the world supernatural to be more charged with reality than when in contact with her (Weil).

Such mysticism had nothing in common with those religious speculations divorced from any personal commitment which are all too frequently the only testimony of individuals who apply themselves to the things of God. She actually experienced in its heart-breaking way the distance between ‘knowing’ and ‘knowing with all one’s soul’, and the object of her life was to abolish that distance.”

Is it too much to hope that someone might someday say something similar about us? Probably, but I still hope that God would make that the object of my life.

Weil’s opening words to the book are:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is its only exception.

Grace is its only exception.  Stop on that one for a moment if you dare. 

So yeah. How could I not be smitten? Simone knows things and she is inviting us on a walk. I accept, and hope that we might walk together if you’re up for it. Maybe in the spring?

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And this:

A friend writes:

Physicists have shown that photons are sometimes entangled. And when they are - they are entangled even when they are separated. That which connects them cannot be seen. They know this because they have done experiments where two entangled photons were separated and sent in two opposite directions using an optical fiber. When one of the protons hit a two-way mirror, particle detectors recorded whether it randomly went through the mirror or bounced off. Whichever action the proton took, its entangled twin simultaneously did the exact same action, even if the protons were 7 miles away. 

So many heart-thoughts on this one. I was struck by this comment, “That which connects them cannot be seen,” which led me down a rabbit trail about seeing and whether seeing something makes that something true and whether not seeing something renders it less so, somehow. And of course, I began thinking about all the things we cannot see, either because we don’t have the eyes to see them or the words to describe them and I found myself wondering about the dance between what we can see and what we have words for, and how no language is ever, ever, ever sufficient to describe what is true and real, but only a way to capture a part of what is true and real long enough to offer a glimpse of it, and only a glimpse of it, to another in hope that it might somehow entangle us. 

And as for the first question about whether seeing something is necessary and sufficient for it to be true and real? Of course not. What does love look like? Or courage? Or trust? Paint me a picture of gravity or grace, if you can, and of course you cannot. Snap a photo of God while you’re at it. Yet what is truer than love or gravity or grace? Or God?

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Finally, most mornings I walk in the park/woods. I have begun trying to sneak out the back door without my words. Some days they catch me before I get to the end of the driveway, but some days I can make it almost the entire way around the park before they find me, and those are the days that the world is terrifying and beautiful and reveals itself, unconstrained and delicious and abundant and generous. 

On Tuesday, in an isolated part of the trail, words desperately chasing after me, I paused long enough to notice a single brown oak leaf. I had no word for leaf and I had no word for its shape and no word for tree and no word for how it had found itself lying beside the trail with other things that looked like it, but not like it at all. 

And somehow, unladen with words, I was able to see the entirety of what we call a leaf all at once. It was no longer a brown flat thing that lay beside the trail. She was a bud suspended 30 feet above when the spring started to waken the chipmunks and honeybees and raccoons from their waiting. She was a tiny green thing stretching toward the sun, opening herself to the newness of the March warmth. She was a thing filled with green, a thing holding fast to her tiny twig during the first spring windstorm.She was learning her very own magic of turning sunlight and green into nourishment for her host, the host on which she depended for her own life. She let the sun direct her gaze, further and further northward each day. She welcomed squirrels that climbed above and below, and washed herself gently in dew each morning and let the sun and morning breeze gently blow her dry. She was playing in the rain and listening to the sounds of the finches and cardinals that came by each morning. She was singing with her brothers and sisters in the summer winds and reveling in the community in which she had found herself, knowing that she was not alone, nor would she ever be.

One day,  she noticed the sun turn back on itself and she turned with it, and she began to grow weary as the sun pushed further and further southward. Finally she began to fade and there was less nourishment for her to offer her host. The air grew cool and then cold, and one day, perhaps after a frost that turned her blood thick as syrup, the leaf let go of her host and fell gently to the ground.  There I found her, waiting to melt back into the rich earth, alongside her lovers and friends and family . 

What the day before had simply been “a leaf” was so much more, and not a solitary thing or even one of millions of leaves that had gathered at the base of the little woods on a random Tuesday in December. No. She was an icon inviting me, and all of us,  to look beyond our mere and feeble words and pointing to what is real and true. She invited me, and all of us, to look past our words that cut things down to size and tell us where and how to look. She was offering anyone who wanted to believe a way to behold that which is worthy of our hearts.

I will continue to try to sneak out without my words. But my words are fearful and crafty and it’s getting harder as they learn to see what I am doing. On Friday, they guarded both the front and back doors as Kathryn and I went walking. But I am not giving up. Perhaps tomorrow.

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Dear friend, I promise you, there is so much more to share with you.  Wonders that defy the chains and filters of our tiny language. Beauty that gently and maybe even lovingly mocks our attempts to keep God between our ears. And I will share with you as much as Time, my dear friend Time, and my wits will allow.

But I also want desperately to hear from you, too.  Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear? How I hope that you might.

Oremus,

Chris